Reflections on April 30th: The Blue Dress of Hope

April 30, 2024

By PIVOT Member, Thien-Nhien Luong

The beauty of the vast blue ocean and the crashing waves on the secluded beach left me awestruck.  However, the radiating heat from the white sandy beach of Kona momentarily transported me back to a fateful day 41 years ago, when my sister and I followed a stranger crossing scorching dunes to "vượt biên."  As pre-teens, we naively understood "vượt biên" as “going to America.”  For that special occasion, I wore my best baby blue outfit, also known as "đồ bộ."

The "HIDDEN HERITAGES: San José’s Vietnamese Legacy" is a multi-year initiative that involved a partnership between the San José Museum of Art, Chopsticks Alley, and the City of San José Office of Cultural Affairs; the project brought Vietnamese artists and community members together to share, amplify, and artistically present stories that reveal the contributions of Vietnamese Americans to San José. In 2022, I was invited to join this project and was honored, but it was an emotional journey recalling and at times reliving those memories.  The renowned Vietnamese artist, Trinh Mai, listened to my 3-hour-long interview and recreated my baby-blue outfit as a dress with my story faintly visible on a translucent soft fabric, which was a wise and artistically encapsulating decision.

During my interview, I mentioned I wore the best blue outfit on that "vượt biên" special occasion. However, at that time, the blue color of the outfit faded due to repeated usage and exposure when drying in the sun. I also outgrew the outfit, and the pants dangled above my knuckles.  During our journey, the blue outfit was stained with engine oil when we hid in the boat engine before reaching the international waters.  Despite that, the outfit remained a beautiful clear blue in my memory, and even after 41 years, the baby blue outfit and a pair of sandals remained etched firmly in my memory. These objects somehow held significant sentimental value for me, as they were the last few items that I owned.  In a way, they symbolized my journey of hope and dreams when I left a place filled with miseries.

To girls and boys whose lives were devastated by conflicts and wars, dates, times, or other chronologic memories may fade year over year, but the feelings of being scared, terrified, threatened, starved, of pain and lost, or the memories of treasured possessions of clothes, shoes, toys etched forever in our memories. These emotional traumas, at times, are like black holes unpredictably, forcefully sucking and transporting us back to unpleasant memories. At different times, they are like ghosts haunting, coming and going at familiar sights or events, such as those seen in the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, mimicking my country’s past 49 years ago.   Though I, and many refugees, were never diagnosed with post-traumatic stress or syndrome disorder (PTSD), I have recognized that these flashes back as recent as 2023 will continue to haunt me for the rest of my life. 

Trinh Mai’s recreation of the blue dress was so appropriate on many levels personally.  The idyllic blue dress designed for a girl whose girly childhood was robbed, and who was too young to understand the politics behind the war, but experienced unfairness to know despair and suffering and missed opportunities because of oppression.  Those frightful experiences during and after the war in addition to the 1-year long of living in 3 refugee camps underlined the foundation of my career and personal commitment to building capacity for young people, especially children so they can tackle and endure life challenges and lead collaborative work through community building processes including commitment to peace.  In remembrance of the Vietnam War or the Black April for the Vietnamese Americans, we must commit to peace because only peace can prevent senseless deaths, injuries, and lifetime and intergenerational traumas. 

Reflections on April 30th: The Story of Banh Bao

April 30, 2024

By PIVOT Board Member, Don-Quyen Thai

Ahh, food and the memories they evoke. There is a quote about this, “I carried to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had let soften a bit of madeleine. But at the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening inside me”.

Now I have to admit that I am in no way as sensitive and eloquent as Marcel Proust in In Search of Lost Time, as a neurologist, I have an added visual dimension to this particular process of our brain. The molecule floating up from the bowl of pho in front of me finds its way to the smell receptor in the nose, then the message gets carried into the olfactory bulb, which then synapse with the neurons that then carry that piece of information directly to the amygdala and hippocampus, the organs of emotion and memory respectively, that trigger our emotional response to food due to the evocation of certain scene, certain moment or peoples in our lives. 

Having left Vietnam 45 years ago at the age of twelve, I have passed many Tet missing the sights, the smells of food and flowers, the sound of family and relatives, and most of all for a kid, the sense of anticipation of this Vietnamese Christmas, Thanksgiving and New Year all rolled into one. The anticipation of new clothes, red envelopes, of sinking my teeth into that banh tet, and most of all, of seeing everybody so happy and carefree for a few days. Now that I am not too busy working full time and more, I am allowing myself a little bit more access into memories of Vietnam, allowing the luxury of nostalgia seep in and make me more conscious of the memory contained in certain sight and smell of food. Like when the waiter at Pho restaurant asks if I want fatty soup in my pho, I am reminded of my father who ordered that the few times I had pho with him. Whereas pate chaud reminds me of Mom who made the best pate chaud in whole world, with buttery fluffy pastry contained therein tender juicy pork with the balance of lean and fatty meat, plenty of chopped onion, and most important, a whole load of black pepper to give it a zing. Braised mackerel brings back the memory of my grandmother who brought a whole pot of it every time she visits us in Saigon from Phan Thiet, a seaside town four hours or more away. I still can’t imagine how she would carry up the crowded bus and sat for hours with it sitting on top of her lap, sharing the fragrance (or odor, depending on how much you love nuoc mam) with the rest of the passengers. And then there are bento, beautiful lacquer boxes with many different size compartment to hold tiny colorful morsel of food in air-conditioned Japanese restaurant where the door is closed against the outside world (in contrast to the many Vietnamese restaurants with their door wide opened), so that when one finishes one’s meal, there is no refugee children waiting to empty your left over bowl of rice or soup into their own metal or plastic container to take home. The smell of Japanese restaurant, that combination of raw fish, soy sauce and vinegared-rice reminds me of how privilege I was and still am, living my whole life without being hungry for one single day. 

And then there is bao, cha siu and hum bao. I used to love them when I was younger, but then for some reason became somewhat apathetic about them. As I said before, with more time on my hand, with less stress to deal with, I regained the memory of that one day in 1975. It was not April 30th when the South fell. It was a few months later when my father and his coworkers were supposed to show up at a local high school for re-education. They were supposed to pack food for one month. At the time, all my nine year-old brain did was to occupy myself with figuring out how one gets a whole month worth of food into a backpack. It was just a math problem for me to figure out how many cups of rice he will be bringing with him. Nothing more. Dad would just be away for one month, as he had been before in the past, at times even three months in the US attending University of Michigan for an executive program. 

But at the end of that month, on the day that he was supposed to come back, he did not. Mom was busy that day and the day before cooking his favorite dishes, and I remembered walking in and out of our home, waiting and waiting. At the end of the evening, when we had accepted that he might not come home that night, I grabbed a banh bao and took a bite, but before I chewed I caught my Mom’s face from the corners of my eyes. I have never seen her look so sad and so scared, while trying her best not to burst out crying in front of us children. What followed inside my mouth was the most tasteless banh bao I have ever eaten. 

That memory got tucked in the recess of my mind for many years.  A memory of deep personal pain and loss. Not only of my own pain, but also that of my mother. My father would spend three years in re-education camp instead of one month. Four months after he was released, we all received legal papers to leave Vietnam except for him. Three weeks after we left, he died. 

And so meanwhile banh bao continued to be made or bought, I only ate it perfunctorily, without really tasting it. Whereas I can close my eyes to inhale and chew a croissant with my utmost devotion, reliving my almost perfect year in France, I usually ate banh bao quickly, without joy, to get it over with. 

But as time can heal all wound—as long as one recognize it and allow it to heal over, it will heal. As one goes on in life, new memory gets created and laid over the old ones, and hopefully their sum is positive. In banh bao’s case, it was my wife My-Linh who transformed its memory. She too likes banh bao, but not enough to make a point to go buy it. Until she won the election in 2018 to become Washington state first Vietnamese state representative. Now through every winter she has to spend 4 nights a week in Olympia, our state capitol.  Soon she discovered that banh bao is the perfect food. All you have to do is to keep it refrigerated, and when you are ready to eat, you just pop it in the microwave for one minute, and voila, dinner is served. Banh bao now provides her sustenance and reminds her of the comfort of home after endless hours of meetings and being at the table, so to speak.  It is also easy for me to pack her three and keep one for myself.  Now as I hold it in one hand and take a bite, the touch and the smell, the textures and the blend of flavors, reminds me that though I just sent my loved one away for the week, she will come back. Each and every time. 

But though banh bao has lost its grip in my psyche as a symbol of loss, every year April 30 comes along and messes me up for the day. For the other 364 days of the year, if I just mind my own business, I am fine being an American. But each year on April 30th, even after almost 50 years, it is still the day that I lost my country.  After half a century, that wound has not healed and still triggers deep emotions, the sense of loss and the pain of exile. Once or twice a year— the other day being my father’s memorial day—  I would let myself go and wallow in those emotions. That particular wound, I don’t know if time will eventually heal, but I know that, by focusing on the present and the future, I can let bygones be bygones, and not let an event that happened years ago beyond my control wreak havoc onto my psychological well-being. Feeling a little pain is poetic, but carrying too much of it reflect a lack of self-discipline.  

Lời Bày Tỏ của Tổ Chức PIVOT về Gaza

Ngày 19 tháng 3 năm 2024

Sứ vụ của tổ chức PIVOT đặt trọng tâm vào các chính sách quốc nội, nhưng đôi lúc các vấn đề quốc ngoại cũng có ảnh hưởng sâu sắc đến nội sự Hoa Kỳ. Sự xung đột giữa Do Thái - Palestine và các biến cố xẩy ra ngày 7 tháng 10 và sau đó tại Gaza đã trở thành một thảm hoạ. Chúng tôi đau xót cho trên 30 ngàn thường dân bị tử vong, nhất là tại Gaza mà đa số là phụ nữ và trẻ con. Ngoài ra còn có trên triệu người bị nạn đói đe dọa. Chưa bao giờ từ sau chiến tranh Việt Nam, số thường dân đã bị ảnh hưởng tàn khốc của bom đạn ở mức độ khủng khiếp như vậy. Chúng tôi nhận thức về gánh nặng lớn lao mà người dân lành đã phải hứng chịu khi quốc gia của họ đã bị biến thành chiến trường.

PIVOT cũng chia sẻ cùng các thành phần cấp tiến với những chỉ trích về cách đối phó và chính sách nhân nhượng đối với Do Thái của chính quyền Biden trong thảm hoạ nhân quyền này. Đã có một tiến bộ khi Phó Tổng Thống Harris kêu gọi một cuộc ngừng bắn, với mục đích chủ yếu là tiến đến sự ngừng chiến toàn bộ để dân lành cả hai bên không còn là nạn nhân của cuộc chiến đẫm máu.

Chúng ta có thể nhìn cuộc xung đột Do Thái -  Palestine và Gaza một cách khác nhau, nhưng cần hiểu rằng nếu Trump thắng cử thì Do Thái sẽ có thêm quyền thao túng để tiếp tục giết chóc dân lành, và cùng lúc tiếp tục phong trào bạc đãi phụ nữ và nạn kỳ thị người da mầu ở khắp nơi trên thế giới, kể cả tại Hoa Kỳ. Vì thế chúng ta cần quyết tâm hành động để ủng hộ tái đắc cử Tổng Thống Biden trong lần bầu cử tổng thống 2024 sắp tới.